“It’s really a very turbulent flow that is rising and flowing onto land pretty quickly.”īefore this happens, though, there may be a few warning signs.įirst you’ll need to survive the earthquake, if there was one. “It’s not going to look like big, curling waves like you see at the beach,” Garrison-Laney says. The tsunami could resemble a wall of water or, more likely, a rapidly rising flood. “It’s really just kind of relentless, the water just keeps on coming and coming and coming for a long time,” Garrison-Laney says. However, tsunamis can surge up to 10 miles inland. When a tsunami comes ashore, areas less than 25 feet above sea level and within a mile of the sea will be in the greatest danger. Most tsunamis are less than 10 feet high when they hit land, but they can reach more than 100 feet high.
When the waves approach land, they will slow to about 20 or 30 miles an hour and begin to grow in height. Out on the sea, these waves can be hundreds of miles long but no taller than a few feet and travel at the speed of a jet plane, up to 500 miles per hour. Undersea volcanic eruptions, landslides, and even meteorites can also spark tsunamis.
BEING IN A TIDAL WAVE DREAM MEANING SERIES
That water gets pushed out as a series of waves that move outwards in all directions. Most tsunamis are triggered when earthquakes near the seafloor displace a large amount of water. “Yes, it will be bad, but…there are some things you can do to be prepared in the event that it happens.” Know the tsunami is coming “It’s easy to say, ‘That’s not going to be my problem ever,’ and it’s also easy to throw up your hands and say, ‘It’s going to be so bad that there’s really nothing I can do,’” says Carrie Garrison-Laney, a tsunami and coastal hazard expert at the Washington Sea Grant office in Seattle. Your exact strategy will depend on where you are, and will go a lot more smoothly if you have planned in advance. But there are a few ways you can protect yourself from these natural disasters. Most people do not survive being swept into a tsunami. But these mega waves can strike in any ocean, and travel across the sea to cause mayhem far from their source about twice per decade.ĭenis García was lucky. It’s estimated that the Great Chilean Earthquake and the tsunami that followed claimed more than 5,000 lives.Īround 80 percent of tsunamis begin along the Pacific Ocean’s seismically active “Ring of Fire.” In the United States, Hawaii, Alaska, and the west coast have the highest tsunami risk.
Meanwhile, the tsunami swept across the Pacific. He did not see the 40-foot-high tsunami barreling toward him until it was too late.Ĭaught in the swirling water, he clung to a piece of debris for hours before meeting another survivor and climbing onto the roof of a house as it floated by, he told interviewers decades later. The waters had drawn back, leaving the seafloor bare. He was searching for his family, not realizing they were safe and on high ground, when he caught sight of Corral Bay. Once the shaking stopped, Denis García, a resident of the nearby port town Corral, noticed something odd. On May 22, 1960, the largest earthquake ever measured struck off the coast of southern Chile. This story originally published on Jand has been updated.
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